WeWeb SSR, SEO, and Static Collection Behaviour

Hey everyone,

I’m currently developing a few websites and, since I already built a visual library I can reuse, I decided to start working on the SEO and prerendering side of things. While going through some recent posts about SSR and how static collections work now after an update in WeWeb, I started looking into alternatives and came across OSTR.IO and Page Replica - Enhance SEO with Prerendering, Caching, and Static Page Serving. Both options seem fairly priced and not so crazy to install.

It seems like a good workaround to handle prerendering and improve SEO without having to build a more complex setup. I think this could be the best next step, especially since other approaches would require a bit more configuration.

Do you think they could work well with WeWeb? Could they be viable directions to take for the website, or is there something I should consider before going down this path?

NOTE: I understand this is a feature that was actually removed. Are there any plans to add a toggle for this behavior in the editor?

Thanks,
Bruno

Hi Bruno,

I looked into pre-rendering before and went down the path of setting up a html rewriter using cloudflare workers, with the plan that dynamic collection content gets injected this way.

In theory it works, but the way WeWeb is hosted, it isn’t possible to change the DNS in Cloudflare to “proxied” which is needed to allow this method to work unfortunately. As a result I didn’t try any other prerendering solutions thinking this will be a similar blocker - but would like to know if you are successful.

Not sure what feature you refer to that was removed? It’s not a simple toggle to achieve this. See the weekly update threads on this forum re. SSR to give you further context.

Hi What Gift,

I gave it a read and I agree with the comments. It’s good news, but honestly a bit underwhelming. Like @MCMichael pointed out, I understand there must be some sort of prioritization method for feature rollouts, but I really think SSR should be much higher on that list.

Understanding the development cost: When comparing it to something like a chat component, I believe SSR could bring way more value to a broader range of use cases, and possible integrations.

What I was referring to is something somewhat related, though not a replacement for SSR, which is the pre-rendering of static collection records. From what I understand, this could have a meaningful impact on performance for the overall app and some SEO benefits.

For static pages that heavily rely on a CMS, I’m thinking of 2 possible pathways right now:

  1. Moving them to a separate platform while SSR is not available; or
  2. Exporting WeWeb’s Vue app and hosting it as a standalone project. That way I could try implementing the pre-rendering technologies I mentioned.

What do you think? I see that you’ve been working some time on your project, so I assume you’ve hit this wall a couple times.

Best,
Bruno